DANIEL Ngarima with Rabbit and Naria.
A young family living at the quiet end of Gadsby Road in Te Kūiti has lost two beloved pet cats, wearing collars.
Two close neighbours have also lost cats, adding up to four over 2023.
“I’m pretty sure someone is shooting them,” Hayley Ellery said.
She and partner Daniel Ngarima had lived on a dairy farm at the road’s end for eight months before the cats vanished. At that time, Hayley was pregnant.
“Narla went first, in September.
“I went away for the weekend and my partner was feeding them. She just disappeared and didn’t come home.”
They went out calling, put flyers in every mailbox (along Oparure Rd as well as Gadsby Rd) and raised the alarm on Facebook. They also checked the roadsides and spoke to all the neighbours.
“Then Rabbit left four months later. He just disappeared.”
By then, Hayley had given birth to baby Aurora.
A neighbour contacted them, saying his cat was also gone.
“He’d realised it hadn’t turned up for two days. He told us his cat would never run away.
“Neither would mine. They’d never run away before. It’s quite horrible.”
“Another neighbour lives over the hill. When I was posting flyers about my cat, she messaged me and said her cat also went missing. So that’s four cats.”
If they had been run over, she said they would be on the road or off to the side.
“And we looked. I searched the whole road; I asked all the neighbours.”
Gadsby Rd is narrow, with properties fenced close to the roadside, and steep banks that might be expected to make any run-over cats visible.
Hayley suspects the cats were killed by hunters.
“I do hear shooting a lot,” she said.
“People often come shooting for goats on our farms. Because we’re such big corporate farms, there are many different people coming through all the time.
“If people have shot cats, they need to stop, because it’s someone’s pet… if it’s a stray, it’s a different story but still they shouldn’t be shooting strays, they should handle them in a different way.”
“When I was doing Facebook and the flyers, I said if someone has shot them, just come and tell me.”
She said no-one contacted her.
Hayley has heard stories about some people on the road trapping cats, but she doesn’t believe it.
“I can’t see anyone on this road owning cat traps, I’ve met a lot of them and they’re all really nice people.
One-year-old Narla was Hayley’s cat, and the “smoochy” Rabbit, aged two or three, was Daniel’s.
“My partner loved that cat.
Rabbit had been the only survivor out of a litter of kittens at his mother’s place – after an attack by a dog or stoat.
“Then out of nowhere, this kitten just pops out from behind the freezer.
“Daniel was like, ‘I’m taking it,’ It was quite sick and ill, we got him all fixed up and everything, and he made himself at home.”
